Where theory meets practice and education meets liberation

This is Most Certainly Us

What I hear when people share how shocked they are at this week’s events in #Charlottesville (and #Seattle)

For many nice White people, this week has been alarming. The death of Heather Heyer at the hands of James Fields. It’s not even just northern liberal Whites. Mr. Fields own mother has expressed shock and disbelief that her son, who she ‘doesn’t really talk politics with’ went to a White supremacist rally. I mean, she knew he was at the Trump rally, but he’s not a White supremacist or anything…

“I don’t really talk to him about, you know, his political views…So I don’t really understand what the rally was all about. I didn’t know it was White supremacist. I thought it had something to do with Trump. Trump’s not a supremacist…I mean he had an African American friend. So…” — Samantha Bloom, mother of attempted mass murderer James Fields.

But no one knows how to model White shock quite like a northern liberal millionaire entertainer for whom ‘activism’ is so fashionable.

“White people are astounded by Birmingham. Black people aren’t. White people are endlessly demanding to be reassured that Birmingham is really on Mars. They don’t want to believe, still less to act on the belief, that what is happening in Birmingham is happening all over the country. They don’t want to realize that there is not one step, morally or actually, between Birmingham and Los Angeles.”

Personally, I was deeply aggravated at the way this kind of cluelessness is so predictable that it is literally built into the #fakenews #MAGA plan.

I get it, and I agree that it is shocking to see a video of a car crashing into a crowd of people, to know that you are watching someone die.

You cannot unwatch something like that.

This is precisely why all those White people showed up at that second march in Selma, because they saw how the first one went down on national television, and were shocked to be confronted with the way that they were seeing humans brutally beaten.

Here’s the thing: Black and Brown people have been shocked to watch our brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, mothers, fathers — our very children die before our eyes for centuries. This is most certainly what the US has always been, still is now and unless we can acknowledge those two facts and demand change, will continue to be.

Dear White people shocked by Charlottesville (and Seattle, btw): Do you think you are the first White person to be shocked by the brutal violence that is the defining feature of your people’s history? Bartolome Las Casas (who invented the idea of using Africans as slave labor in the Americas) has you beat by about 450 years.

…Las Casas read Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s book. The more he read, the less he could square the African slave trade with the teachings of Jesus Christ. In History of the Indies (1561), released five years before his death, Las Casas regretted “the advice he gave the king” to import enslaved Africans. He saw in Zurara’s writing evidence revealing the slave trade to “be the horror that it is.” Las Casas lamented Zurara’s attempt “to blur [the slave trade] with the mercy and goodness of God.” Las Casas tried to close the door on African slavery, after opening it for so many Spanish slaveholders. He failed. A powerful reformer labeled a radical extremist in his last days — like every antiracist who came after him — Las Casas was condemned in Spain after his death, and his works were practically banned there.

— Ibram X. Kendi, from “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” (page 27)

The idea that anything but violence and exploitation lie at the foundation of American society, underpinned and enabled by the relative ignorance of poor and middle class White Americans is magical thinking. White people have been convinced of the lie that America is for them and that they are better than the other “races,” since way back in 1680, when:

…the Virginia Assembly, after Bacon’s Rebellion, gave amnesty to white servants who had rebelled, but not to blacks. Negroes were forbidden to carry any arms, while whites finishing their servitude would get muskets, along with corn and cash. The distinctions of status between white and black servants became more and more clear. In the 1720s, with fear of slave rebellion growing, white servants were allowed in Virginia to join the militia as substitutes for white freemen. At the same time, slave patrols were established in Virginia to deal with the “great dangers that may . . . happen by the insurrections of negroes. . . .” Poor white men would make up the rank and file of these patrols, and get the monetary reward.

— Howard Zinn, from “A People’s History of the United States”

This is the way the game was set up, even before the Nina the Pinta and Santa Genocidio left that port in Conquista-landia.

This is how we have built, maintained, and defended the wealthiest and most terrifyingly, world-endingly powerful and violent empire in the history of humankind. We just didn’t realize that we were being indoctrinated into a colonized curriculum. We have been taught the history of our conquerors.

This is a society built on the land of a people exterminated in the largest genocide of human history, and built by a half million Africans and their children, doomed to die in bondage for 20 generations, and then to suffer through round after round of indignity, brutality, and violent indiscriminate slaughter.

This is the chief export of America, our voracious appetite for clothes and electronics and products of every shape and size made by suffering women and children in remote corners of the world. Not to mention the oil needed to transport and manufacture all of it, or the bombs we drop on children to defend it. Our appetite for exploitation and violence is as insatiable as the grave itself.

The mood in the room palpably shifted, and though I think everyone in the room wanted to disagree, it was pretty easy to see her point. We are all sort of stuck on this express train toward our violent destruction, and we all feel in our conscience that this can’t possibly be sustainable, that we are inevitably headed toward some violent breaking point in our society. We can deny it if we want to, but I have heard far too many ‘apocalypse preparedness’ jokes to discount it as anything other than the zeitgeist. Here’s the crazy thing we are betraying when we think ‘this is not us’ though: the neo-nazis are not joking about buying guns, growing their own food, and surviving the next civil war or nuclear apocalypse.

They

are

PRACTICING

for

it.

Check out 1:44, where he literally says “that’s not who we are…”

You think the NRA is joking about violently overthrowing the government?

You think these guys are just really into pockets?

These are not police or military. That weird half-confederate-flag patch replaces the stars on the USA half with a “Three Percenter” logo. Also note the “Blue Lives Matter” Patch on the left (the black and white one, with one blue ‘line’)

You think this longstanding genre of photo is some kind cliche or joke?

These people are not playing around, and it’s time we stopped playing around or trying to find a safe and comfortable space for ourselves while other people are suffering.

At the beginning of the 2017 film adaptation of “I Am Not Your Negro,” Dick Cavett interviews James Baldwin, and asks him a question that he admits is probably old hat for his guest by now:

“Why aren’t they more optimistic,” he asks, referring to what he calls “the Negroes.” (It was 1968, back when ‘the Whites’ still said it that way on national TV) “…it’s getting so much better. There are Negro mayors, there are Negroes in all of sports. There are Negroes in politics. They are even accorded the ultimate accolade of being in television commercials now…Is it at once getting much better and still hopeless?”

Baldwin does not need much time to respond. “I don’t think there’s much hope for it, you know, to tell you the truth, as long as people are using this peculiar language. It’s not a question of what happens to the Negro here, or to the Black man here. That’s a very vivid question for me, you know — but the real question is what’s going to happen to this country…”

You see friends, if we really care for the future of this country that we are citizens of, if we want the statement “This is not US” to actually mean anything other than absolution for silent, ignorant complicity, then we have to start getting comfortable, fluent even, with naming the deception that has been perpetrated against the people now living in America. We have been sold a whopper of a lie, that America is this grand progression from glory to ever greater glory, and that our progress and indomitable spirit work carry us forward inevitably into our shared destiny.

It’s not that we haven’t made any progress. We have.

It’s that responding to injustice with statements about progress, attempts to absolve us from taking responsibility for the present. Statements about our good intentions attempt to absolve us from taking responsibility for our impact. Statements about our principles and values as America attempts to absolve us from taking responsibility for the legacy of violence and exploitation that is the foundation of our comfortable lives.

We have neither been great, nor have we been truly free, but what freedom and greatness we COULD have will come from our shared struggle to end the unbroken chain of our inherited trauma.

Abram Guerra: Strategist and entrepreneur focused on driving impact, growth, and value through innovation and partnership. Outside of work, I like talking with friends and writing about the newest gadgets and oldest ideas, experiencing cultures through food, music, and history, and traveling to and exploring new places (i.e. getting lost) with my wife, Lisa. You can follow him here

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Published by Abram Guerra

Abram is a passionate learner that focuses all the energy he can muster on the work of justice for all people. He believes that the purpose of education is not merely a vehicle for a hard-working few to have a pathway out of need, but our best vehicle to freeing humankind from what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. termed as the "triple evils"--Racism, Capitalism, and Militarism. He occupies a particular set of (sometimes contradictory) identities and intersections: Angry and stubborn como un Apache guerrero, educated and articulate like a fancy güero, passionate about Jesus and sharing his harsh attitude toward the judgmental hypocrites that like to claim Him, a student of history, music, and poetry with some solid statistics, technology, and policy chops, a professional ethnographer and a designer who hates the elitism and bias of designers and ethnographers, a troublemaker and rabble rouser who hesitates to embrace the title of educator or activist.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
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